North Coast 500

I, like many others, always want to escape on holiday to a foreign country with better weather. This makes us forget about the beautiful country we live in is. So… for Reiss’ 21st, we decided to do a road trip around the Scottish Highlands.

A lot of people have asked how many days it took, where we stayed etc. so I thought I would write a list if anyone is interested in doing it in the future.

We went in the middle of May from Wednesday morning- Sunday night.

On the first day, we drove from Edinburgh up past Inverness and stayed in a cute Wigman near the Muir of Ord. It was in the grounds of an activity centre which was very peaceful as there were people staying in the house but not in the wigwam next to us so we literally felt like we were in the middle of nowhere.

On Thursday, we drove from Inverness to John o’ Groats. We stopped at Dunrobbin castle which was stunning and walked around the gardens of Castle of Mey. We went to John o’ Groats sign and Dunnet Head and then made our way to our 2nd wigwam near Wick. It was looking over a field and we had a BBQ which was lovely.

On the 3rd day, we drove along to Scourie and the views along the North Coast were breathtaking. We stopped at some beaches and the only official tourist-y attraction we stopped at was smoo cave which was cool. We stopped at a small market where Cocoa Mountain is where they apparently make the best hot chocolates. It was one of the best hot chocolates we have had to be fair. We stayed at Scourie Lodge B&B which was a quaint building looking over the water which was beautiful. It was a nice place to walk around for the evening.

On the 4th day, it rained the majority of the day. Again, the views along this coast were like something you would see in the Caribbean… We went up and along Applecross Pass which is a must! I was cautious driving along the road as it was very narrow (the majority of the roads up in the highlands are one way with frequent passing places). We spent our last night staying in Movyegan House on Loch Duich– which again, was stunning.

We drove back on the Sunday with some D-tours to some places we thought would look nice. On the North Coast, I would recommend staying in the places we stayed but I would not try and plan much else around it. There are plenty of viewing points, passing places and tourist attractions where you can stop and take a walk around. It would have been good to have a couple of more days to have the flexibility to travel across to some of the islands and really to be able to chill. We bought an official NC500 map at Dunrobbin Castle gift shop which was really helpful. I got very little/ no phone signal anywhere and it was so good not being on my phone too (other than to take photos of course).

Overall we drove 881 miles door to door and I would definitely recommend doing it!
Places we stayed:

To find accommodation, I worked out the maximum about of miles we would like to travel and rough places to stop. I used booking.com to find some nice places to stay. It was nice to have Wigwams and B&B but if you were looking to spend less on accommodation there are plenty of campsites scattered across the route. A couple we spoke to on route booked there campsite each day as they went along.